XBlog

Do your customers trust you?

While going through the inbox on my desk, where mostly trade pubs and “things to read later” collect, I uncovered this gem of an article from Forbes.com published in late May–the title reads simply “Do your customers trust you?” Even though the article is written towards financial advisers, we can generalize this to all service providers. The most poignant bit is where the author discusses vendor and customer perceptions of the services provided:

The State Street/Wharton survey found that while trust was clearly important to both advisers and their clients, each side had a different take on the building blocks of that trust. Nearly three quarters of both groups cited trust as the most important characteristic of a financial adviser, but the big discrepancies were in performance and cost-per-service. Just 4% of the advisers thought performance was the most important selection criteria, compared with 10% of the clients; only 5% of the advisers voted for cost, versus 12% for clients.

Those differences may have had something to do with the two sides’ perceptions of overall satisfaction. Advisers clearly have a higher opinion of their services than customers do. A whopping 56% of the advisers felt that their clients were “very satisfied,” while only 24% of clients concurred; meanwhile, 6% of advisers felt that clients were “somewhat satisfied,” a far cry from the 28% of clients who felt that way.

Obviously we skew perceptions to favor our position (it’s called Confirmation Bias). We, whatever our role–vendor, client, spouse, friend, student, etc–want to confirm what we believe, or want to believe, about our relationships. What vendor doesn’t want to believe customers love their product or service?

At XNet, though we’ve enjoyed tremendous customer goodwill over our company history, we haven’t been as conscientious as we could be in soliciting customer feedback. So, for all of the XNet customers reading this–do you trust us? Why, or why not? Let us know. And if you aren’t an XNet customer, try asking this of your customer base; if you don’t hear what you want to hear, take it as valuable feedback to help grow your business and an opportunity to deepen client relationships.